An Aug. 9 story reported on a Garden Grove resident who, wanting to save water, installed an artificial lawn, only to discover that the city bans artificial turf.

The headline in print was: "Yards of fake grass flaunt lawn and order: Five cities in Orange County review bans on faux turf during state's current drought."

Several readers who didn't leave names did leave annoyed phone messages, along the lines of this one: "The article uses the word 'flaunt,' which means to show off. The word you want is 'flout.' Look it up in the dictionary."

Confronted by a summary of the readers' comments, Mark McGonigle, senior copy chief, responded that yes, the usual expression would be "flout law and order." And yes, that would have worked too. However, defending the headline but conceding the point, he said, "I think 'flaunt' works too, because she's making a display of her lawn and the fact that it stays green and orderly. I think it would have been better to say 'flout,' though, just so as not to raise the question in readers' minds."

Here's the Times stylebook entry on the two words in question:

flaunt, flout: To flaunt means to make an ostentatious, conspicuous or defiant display. To flout is to mock, to ignore, to show scorn or contempt for: He flouted good manners by flaunting his new wealth.

Photo: Jean Orban relaxes on her (fake) front yard. Credit: Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times

Below are links to some of the past week's columns by ombudsmen, readers' representatives and editors around the nation. More columns and information about ombudsmen in the U.S. and around the world can be found at the Organization of News Ombudsmen website (which has a permanent link on the right side of this page).

Times readers and others since late July have sent notes by the dozens to the readers' representative office, asking if The Times was looking into a story published by the National Enquirer containing allegations about John Edwards. National Editor Scott Kraft sent an e-mail Thursday night to the Times' communications department and the readers' representative office, two departments that have fielded the questions about how this story was being handled. [Update: This posting earlier said that The Times hadn't published anything about the Enquirer reports; in fact, the Opinion LA blog did post an item on July 23 that was a roundup of coverage by others.] Kraft's note:

"We have decided to post, on Top of the Ticket, an item and link to a Charlotte Observer report, quoting Democratic supporters of Edwards on the record as saying that they think he needs to address the National Enquirer report if he hopes to speak at the convention.

"While we have stayed away from that Enquirer report, because we couldn't confirm it, this strikes us as a legitimate story -- that on-the-record Dems, including a former Edwards campaign manager, are criticizing Edwards' decision to stay mum on the topic and saying it might affect his credibility enough that he wouldn't get a speaking slot at the convention. (Those speaking slots haven't been decided yet, the party says.)"

Reporter Jia-Rui Chong's Column One story on Mitch Hood, a former Marine whose two tours in Iraq left him facing, as Chong wrote, "a new enemy: sleep," included at the end this invitation: "Join us for a live Web chat at noon today as two Veterans Affairs experts discuss the influence of war on sleep and the ways that physicians try to treat the resulting problems. Go to www.latimes.com/sleepchat."

It was a new dimension for Chong and offered a chance for readers to meet Hood, the subject of her profile, online. The veteran showed up as well as the two experts, Dr. Thomas C. Neylan of the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and Steve Woodward of the Sleep Research Laboratory at the VA's National Center for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in Palo Alto.

Chong's carefully crafted published story, published Aug. 5, seems a contrast to the sprawling conversation online that involved as many as five people e-talking about different things at once, over the course of about an hour.

Lindsay Barnett, the online editor who moderates the chats for latimes.com, notes some limitations to holding chats. There’s that overlap in conversation when one person is typing an answer while another person has posted an entirely different question, for instance. But a live blog offers “a unique way for the reader to be able to interact directly in a way that you can't so much reading the story or e-mailing the writer of a story or commenting on a message board. There’s something about the immediacy, knowing they're there reading it at the same time you’re writing it."

As its own form of storytelling, it is time- and resource-intensive, involving at least one reporter, editors, sources and technical help all available at the same time. The number of people involved in producing the chat has to be measured against the number of readers who benefit (Barnett says that a chat might typically have about 20 to 50 participants; a celebrity- or sports-driven one might have 100; this one had about 60). But Barnett judges the success of a chat not just by the number of participants but by quality of the questions, and “if people are getting something from it." Many of the four or five chats a month The Times offers are for sports- and entertainment-related stories. Barnett says, “Sometimes the comments we just get are ‘omg, I love you,’ that sort of thing. For this one, there were thoughtful comments and opinions; people had interesting ideas to offer.”

The online doors were thrown open a bit before noon on Tuesday for a conversation that lasted more than an hour. How do Chong and the editor on the story, Steve Padilla, think it went? Their answers follow.

The performance of latimes.com, and recent developments there, are covered in this memo to staff from Executive Editor for Interactive Meredith Artley:

Colleagues: We can’t say the summers are slow anymore. Latimes.com set an all-time record of 127 million page views for July, cruising past the previous record of 120 million set in May. That’s 66% growth from this time last year. More than 19 million unique users visited in July, another all-timer.

We were on track to break that May record by a few million page views, and then the earthquake happened, pushing us even further ahead.

You’ll see more traffic driving elements in the most-viewed lists below. But there are other reasons for the growth. We’re using technology and the Web at large to spread our journalism far and wide. Latimes.com keeps getting better at SEO (search engine optimization), which means our stories are ranking higher in Google and other search engines. We are also performing better on sites like Digg.com. All that adds up to more exposure and more readership than ever before.

Other highlights of the month included the launch of Hero Complex, the new sci-fi and beyond blog featuring Geoff Boucher and other print and Web contributors. Hero Complex was the home for our outstanding Comic-Con coverage, with great live blogging, creative video and exclusive interviews. Also, Eric Ulken and the “cool kids” team took a break from their hard news database work and launched a fun database of L.A. dog names and breeds. Some great work went into the “Big Burn” fire series. And to top it off, latimes.com is a finalist in four categories for the Online Journalism Awards:

Below are links to some of the past week's columns by ombudsmen, readers' representatives and editors around the nation. More columns and information about ombudsmen in the U.S. and around the world can be found at the Organization of News Ombudsmen website (which has a permanent link on the right side of this page).

Here's the message from Davan Maharaj, sent July 30:

Colleagues,

The indictment of Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens received front page treatment in all the top papers today. Lost in all the hoopla was the fact that the federal investigation was sparked by great journalism from our DC bureau. Here's a link to Chuck Neubauer's story that ran in 2003.

It shows that our journalism is continuing to have wide impact.

Davan

Editor Russ Stanton's memo to the newsroom:

Colleagues,

A few weeks ago, we announced that we would be losing 150 of our newsroom colleagues and reducing the number of pages we printed by 15%. The announced layoffs are now concluded, and we are losing fewer colleagues (135) and fewer pages (14%) than initially forecast. The process has been painful, and we've had to say goodbye to too many good friends and co-workers.

Our challenge now is to focus on the tasks at hand -- to break stories online and in the paper and continue putting resources toward the in-depth investigative reports that we're known for. This week, we have magnificent examples of both:

Within hours, more than 300,000 readers turned to us for information about the quake. And the excellent Wildfire series is a great reminder of what we're capable of -- wonderful storytelling, brilliant documentary photography, video and graphics, and dazzling design, in print and online.

The note from Lori Morse of Los Angeles explained that she was a longtime reader and she worried about the loss of features and staffers from The Times. She offered to help in any way she could. She also wrote, "I do not care for the blogs, I just see them interfering with real news reportage.  Everybody has an opinion but what are the FACTS." In a follow-up note, she added, "I feel it is a confusing term and one not associated with QUALITY news reporting."

On at least two counts, Morse is not alone. First, many readers have expressed fear and concern for their hometown paper, which they see and have been told is growing smaller. Second, many readers see "blog" and think "opinion."

The two points are related: As the print edition has fewer pages, the measure of The Times these days includes the reporting that appears online only. And the information on a growing number of blogs represents hundreds of reported pieces a week by the same writers whose work readers value in the printed news articles.

Tony Pierce, the editor who oversees the blogs, estimates that some 125 Times reporters contribute to at least one of the 43 blogs (each blog has two to 10 writers contributing). There are dispatches from Baghdad (Babylon & Beyond), news updates from Hollywood (Gold Derby, among others) and the great outdoors (Outposts). There's "the inside scoop on food in Los Angeles," as the Daily Dish describes itself. The Bottleneck Blog reports on Los Angeles traffic. Reporter Patrick Goldstein's The Big Picture, which started as a popular column in the Calendar section covering entertainment, media and pop culture, recently became a blog. Its transformation symbolizes how vital blogs are as vehicles for reporting. Goldstein noted in his first column online one reason for the growth to the Web: "The world of entertainment and pop culture is moving so fast that it's become impossible to keep up with all the action without weighing in more often than once a week."

None of the news blogs, though, is opinion.

Thus a reader of the Homeroom page could be informed by an exchange between education reporter Howard Blume and a reader asking a question based on Blume's article on how the state counts high school dropouts. The Health staff reported on its blog a study that suggests that the tobacco industry is manipulating the contents of cigarettes to appeal more to young people. And Countdown to Crawford ("the last days of the Bush administration") reports on a Supreme Court error.

"One thing worth noting is the difference between ‘voice’ and ‘opinion’ –- a lot of our blogs have a lot of voice, such as Top of the Ticket and L.A. Land," says Meredith Artley, who is the executive editor of interactive at The Times.

Science and Medicine Editor Ashley Dunn makes the announcement in a staff memo:

Mary Engel is joining the science desk after almost two years as a healthcare reporter for the California section. She will cover infectious diseases and public health.

Mary joined The Times in 1999 as editorial page editor of the Valley edition. She moved to the downtown editorial pages in 2001. In 2005-2006, she was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, where she studied global health, infectious diseases and medical ethics.

Before joining The Times, Mary worked for the Anchorage Daily News and the Albuquerque Journal. She’s a graduate of Rhodes College in Memphis with a degree in American studies.